Millions of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans are performed each year to diagnose health conditions and perform biomedical research. The different tissues in our bodies react to magnetic fields in varied ways, allowing ...

Piezoelectric materials, which generate an electric current when compressed or stretched, are familiar and widely used: think of lighters that spark when you press a switch, but also microphones, sensors, motors and all kinds ...

Birds do it and so do doughnut-shaped fusion facilities called "tokamaks." But tokamak chirping— a rapidly changing frequency wave that can be far above what the human ear can detect—is hardly welcome to researchers who ...

Rumour has it that Albert Einstein spent his last few hours on Earth scribbling something on a piece of paper in a last attempt to formulate a theory of everything. Some 60 years later, another legendary figure in theoretical ...

Photonics researchers at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) have achieved the extra-ordinary by creating a diode consisting of light that can be used, for the first time, in miniaturised photonic circuits, as published ...

Researchers have developed a new flexible sensor with high sensitivity that is designed to perform variety of chemical and biological analyses in very small spaces. The sensor's small size means that it could potentially ...

When noble metals, like gold, are treated with an aliphatic thiol, like alkanethiol, a uniform monolayer—a layer only one molecule deep—self-assembles on the surface. Each individual molecule can conduct electrons. This ...

Chemical compounds all carry distinctive absorption "fingerprints" within the mid-infrared spectral region of 2 to 12 microns. This offers an opportunity to measure and study chemicals at extremely sensitive levels but researchers ...

An emerging field that has generated a wide range of interest, spin caloritronics, is an offshoot of spintronics that explores how heat currents transport electron spin. Spin caloritronics researchers are particularly interested ...

Quantum mechanics has fundamental speed limits—upper bounds on the rate at which quantum systems can evolve. However, two groups working independently have published papers showing for the first time that quantum speed ...

Researchers have produced a "human scale" demonstration of a new phase of matter called quadrupole topological insulators that was recently predicted using theoretical physics. These are the first experimental findings to ...

Exotic physics can happen when quantum particles come together and talk to each other. Understanding such processes is challenging for scientists, because the particle interactions can be hard to glimpse and even harder to ...

Symmetry plays a fundamental role in understanding complex quantum matter, particularly in classifying topological quantum phases, which have attracted great interests in the recent decade. An outstanding example is the time-reversal ...

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a flat optical component that is simultaneously a metalens, a microscope objective that can resolve details smaller ...

Bioreactors are widely used to produce different therapeutics in the biopharmaceutical and regenerative medicine industries. Drug development relies on small multi-well plates shaken around an orbital diameter, while production-scale ...

A scientific team led by the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has found a new way to take the local temperature of a material from an area about a billionth of a meter wide, or approximately 100,000 times ...

The mystery of why comets travelling through Space give off X-ray emissions has been solved thanks to new research undertaken by a team that included science staff from STFC's Central Laser Facility (CLF) and RAL Space.

If a hard-boiled egg is spun fast enough on a table, it will slowly stand upright as it continues to spin. Although the spinning egg rises due to the force of friction between the egg and the table, the full explanation involves ...

An international research team has discovered a new type of curved light beam called a "photonic hook." Photonic hooks are unique, as their radius of curvature is two times smaller than their wavelength. This is the smallest ...

For the first time in the world, NIMS, JAEA and J-PARC jointly succeeded in observing electron spin arrangements in sample materials by applying a neutron beam to a sample and quantifying the neutrons transmitted through ...

A voltage sensing scheme developed by researchers from Singapore could improve the accuracy of reading data from spin-based memory systems with only minimal modifications. The scheme responds dynamically to voltage changes ...

Physicists from the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, researchers from Chalmers University of Technology and computer scientists from Lobachevsky University have developed a new software tool ...

University of Houston scientists are helping to develop a technology that could hold the key to unraveling one of the great mysteries of science: what constitutes dark matter? Scientists believe dark matter makes up 85 percent ...

Most people who are paid a salary can be quite confident that the subject of their work actually exists. Physicists studying dark matter differ from most people in this respect. Regardless, talented young scientists continue ...

Scientists predicted a new phase of superionic ice, a special form of ice that could exist on Uranus, Neptune, and exoplanets. This new type of ice, called P21/c-SI phase, occurs at pressures greater than those found inside ...

If you think of the human body, microvascular networks comprised of the smallest blood vessels are a central part of the body's function. They facilitate the exchange of essential nutrients and gasses between the blood stream ...

In the emerging field of magnon spintronics, researchers seek to transport and process information by means of so-called magnon spin currents. In contrast to electrical currents, on which todays information technology is ...

In 1987, Paul W. Anderson, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, proposed that high-temperature superconductivity, or loss of electrical resistance, is related to an exotic quantum state now known as quantum spin liquid. Magnetic ...

A millisecond burst of light on a computer monitor signaled production of the first plasma in a powerful new device for advancing research into magnetic reconnection—a critical but little understood process that occurs ...

Living with motor neurone disease for more than 50 years, Stephen Hawking transcended his disability to becoming one of science's brightest stars, harnessing technology to once again give voice to his ideas.

World dignitaries, celebrities and academics on Wednesday mourned Stephen Hawking, the British physicist who died aged 76 after a cosmic career in which his mental genius transcended his physical disability to probe the secrets ...

British physicist Stephen Hawking was one of the most famous sufferers of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the fatal neurological disease that paralysed his body but did nothing to curb his contribution to science.

Researchers have designed carbon aerogels that can be reversibly stretched to more than three times their original length, displaying elasticity similar to that of a rubber band. By adding reversible stretchability to aerogels' ...

Measuring the mass of a celestial body is one of the most challenging tasks in observational astronomy. The most successful method uses binary systems because the orbital parameters of the system depend on the two masses. ...

A team of researchers from Korea, the U.K. and Denmark has found fossilized brains of sea creatures that lived during the Cambrian explosion. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes ...

On Nov. 11, 2014, a global network of telescopes picked up signals from 300 million light years away that were created by a tidal disruption flare—an explosion of electromagnetic energy that occurs when a black hole rips ...

This year's unexpectedly aggressive flu season reminds everyone that although the flu vaccine can reduce the number of people who contract the virus, it is still not 100 percent effective. Researchers report that a tweak ...

For centuries, scientists and scholars have measured the influence of individuals and discoveries through citations, a crude statistic subject to biases, politics and other distortions. A new paper led by the Knowledge Lab ...

The world drinks a lot of wine, and that means a lot of grapes are consumed every year. But not every part of the grape ends up in the bottle. Seeds, stalks and skins—roughly a quarter of the grapes —- are typically discarded ...

Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed new wound dressings that dramatically accelerate healing ...

Setting off smoke bombs is more than good fun on the Fourth of July. The military uses smoke grenades in dangerous situations to provide cover for people and tanks on the move. But the smoke arms race is on. Increasingly, ...

The Colonial Pipeline, which carries fuel from Texas to New York, ruptured last fall, dumping a quarter-million gallons of gas in rural Alabama. By the time the leak was detected during routine inspection, vapors from released ...

British billionaire businessman Sanjeev Gupta will built the world's biggest battery in South Australia, officials said Friday, overtaking US star entrepreneur Elon Musk's project in the same state last year.

A novel quantum effect observed in a carbon nanotube film could lead to the development of unique lasers and other optoelectronic devices, according to scientists at Rice University and Tokyo Metropolitan University.

For biologists, a single cell is a world of its own: It can form a harmonious part of a tissue, or go rogue and take on a diseased state, like cancer. But biologists have long struggled to identify and track the many different ...

An unexpected phenomenon known as zero field switching (ZFS) could lead to smaller, lower-power memory and computing devices than presently possible. The image shows a layering of platinum (Pt), tungsten (W), and a cobalt-iron-boron ...

Michigan auditors who conducted a fake "phishing" attack on 5,000 randomly selected state employees said Friday that nearly one-third opened the email, a quarter clicked on the link and almost one-fifth entered their user ...

By analysing a prehistoric site in the Libyan desert, a team of researchers from the universities of Huddersfield, Rome and Modena & Reggio Emilia has been able to establish that people in Saharan Africa were cultivating ...

NASA has powered on its latest space payload to continue long-term measurements of the Sun's incoming energy. Total and Spectral solar Irradiance Sensor (TSIS-1), installed on the International Space Station, became fully ...

Boulder, Colo., USA: Interest in human evolution has stimulated new geological work in the southern rift valley of Kenya. A new Geological Society of America Bulletin article by Anna K. Behrensmeyer and colleagues presents ...

A team of researchers with members from several institutions in France has found a new way to study cell lineage over multiple generations. They developed a device (which they call a "mother machine") that is capable of separating ...